


Out Under the Soft Stars

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [50]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Coping, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 08:16:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14786805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: The Dag finds Capable working late in the Vault, and takes her on a trip out to the terraces.





	Out Under the Soft Stars

Evening had long ago given up her gown to night by the time the Dag made her way down to the Vault. She hated it there, couldn’t stand to see those walls around her. But only Cheedo and Capable spent any real time there, anyway; Toast was always in the garages, or the War Boy barracks, and never far from Furiosa. The green thumbs, the breedersand War Boys who answered to her, now (and she had won that by herself, for herself, with Pheona’s teeth and her spitting words and the Keeper’s precious seeds) they called the Knowing Furiosa’s daemon. Since her eagle was so rarely seen by her side, it almost fit. The Dag shook her head when she heard it, but they were severed War Boys, sentenced to die soft in the dirt. They didn’t understand, really, what daemons were.

She was teaching them pride in the green ways, and wonder in seedlings. Before her family’s oasis was burned by Joe’s War Boys, she’d been Teacher there. She’d known seeds and green and water. It was Joe’s barren Vault that felt like it would kill her, with the stone and glass and dead air that stank of blood and sweat and _him_.

Even now, even with three new moons between Joe’s death and this night, the Dag hesitated outside the huge, heavy door. It was never closed, now. A pile of rocks and sand held it open. But she hesitated anyway, and Pheona’s claws made echoing clicks when she walked down the tunnel. She wouldn’t have come at all, but it had been more than seven days since she’d seen the hydroponics and last time she’d been here they were visibly yellow.

There was light burning in the Vault, which meant someone else was still awake at this silent hour. If it was Cheedo, the Dag would have told her to sleep, would have curled around her like a vixen around her cubs. Would have stayed the whole night in the Vault if it meant she could spend it next to Cheedo.

But instead Capable was hunched next to the flickering light of a lantern with Caelai curled up by her arm, pouring over one of Miss Giddy’s books. The Dag still thought of them as belonging to the History Woman, with the precious stories scrawled across her ancient skin, as papery and thin as the books she tended. If the living green had not called to her, if she had been more like her old Teacher, the Dag thought she would have been happy to hide within the books for the rest of her life. She would search for the knowledge her sisters needed like a fox digging up rabbit holes, knowing there was something precious at the other end of hard scrabbling work.

“You’re up late,” she said, sliding into the chair next to Capable. The red-haired fire girl had thrown herself into the logistics of the Citadel with all the fervent dedication she had once placed in Angharad. And she had been a Gastown girl, she knew what numbers could do. How easy it was to step away and forget that there were people involved at all. Because she was Capable, though, the Dag wasn’t worried. Capable had too big a heart to look at numbers and see only shapes in a book.

“I’m trying to see how many people we can feed. From what I can tell, we have enough water for every single Wretched to drink their fill. But green is harder. We’ll still need a lot put aside for trade.”

“If the Bullet Farm or Gastown agree to trade with us,” Pheona growled.

Capable sighed, blowing a clump of hair out of her face. She hunched her shoulders over the book and stayed quiet so long the Dag had reached out to touch her shoulder, only to see the tear that spattered across the edge of the page. Capable wiped it away hurriedly, shaking her head and rubbing at her eyes. Her hare, who had uncurled when the Dag and Pheona sat down, made a soft sound and nudged her head under her human’s hand.

“Stupid, stupid,” Capable said, pushing the book out of range of anymore tear drops. “I can’t stop thinking how Angharad would be able to _do_ this. She could talk to Gastown and the Bullet Farm, she could talk to our own War Boys. She always knew what to say.”

“No she didn’t,” the Dag corrected drily. “She always said the truth. That’s something different.”

Capable sniffed and laughed a little. “She could have convinced anybody.”

“She convinced Furiosa,” the Dag agreed.

“It should be her here now. This was her dream.”

“She never planned on coming back.” The Dag drew patterns in the wood of the table, Pheona standing with her front paws on the bench beside her. “We were reaping escape, not revolution.”

“Still.” Capable shrugged her wrap higher around her shoulders, pulling her hand away from Caelai’s comfort. “I can’t help but sit here and wonder what she would do. She would know what to do, Dag. I… I’m just staring at numbers wishing they’d make sense.”

The Dag thought for a moment, tapping her fingers against the wood. It was obvious that words weren’t going to make an impression on her sister, not in a grief like this. They all grieved, of course they did, but no one the Dag had ever met could grieve like Capable. Capable who could take one look at a person and understand that they were _worth_ looking at. She had been the one who knew Angharad’s words by heart, before she’d even said them. _We are not things._ The paint hadn’t even had a chance to fade from the wall behind them, white letters glowing in the dark.

“Come on,” the Dag reached out and took Capable’s hand in hers, resolve blooming in her chest and falling out of her words like fruit. “There’s something you should see.”

Capable left the ledgers easily enough, sighed once as the Dag pulled her out of the Vault and up the stairs to the terraces. It was freezing cold outside, in the way that deserts are always cold at night, but the green that overflowed the paths around them somehow muted the chill. The Dag stopped by a greenhouse to pull out an old blanket, shaking out some of the dirt and humming quietly. Caelai flicked her ears back and forth, warily, and Capable felt a thin crust of fear under the calm that Pheona was trying to exude. This place was alien to her, alive, and even at night it seemed to shiver with a thousand lives that simply did not care Capable and her daemon existed.

The Dag moved through all this life with deceptive grace, flicking at tree leaves and brushing her hands along grass stalks heavy with seeds. Pheona darted off into the field at one point, and Caelai leapt out of her skin at the sudden movement. The Dag turned to smile at Capable, put a finger to her lips.

“Remember the stars, out in the dunes?” she whispered, stopping out away from the shelter of the greenhouses and the orchard. “When we slept with the Vuvalini and saw a satellite?”

“Nux and I slept in the lookout’s nest,” Capable tried not to let her sadness stop up the words in her throat. Nux, who had been sweet and broken. Nux, who had looked at her like she was the sun, and had died historic. On the Fury Road. Caelai let out a tiny, halting cry, and it was half instinct that made Capable form the Vuvalini’s old gesture, clutching the memory of a lost one and bringing it down close to her chest.

“It’s this way,” Pheona said, reappearing out of the waist-high grasses. She glanced at Capable and Caelai, then to her human. “We’re supposed to be cheering them up,” she added, sternly. The Dag only reached out to put a hand on Capable’s shoulder, hesitant and sad.

“It was the first time we’d seen the stars for real,” the Dag finished her story, regret heavy as crude oil in her voice. It wasn’t Nux’s death she regretted, though perhaps she had cared about the War Boy in her strange way. It was Capable’s grief she rued, the unintentional sadness she had called up. First Angharad, now Nux. Capable had always had such a fragile heart. “The first time we saw them for themselves, and not through that glass window. Come on. Pheona and I have found a place.”

The Dag took her by the hand and led her into the field, careful of the wavering stalks. Pheona trotted by their side, visible only as a shivering wake of moon-bleached leaves, and Caelai trailed behind her, lost in the covering gloom of the crops. It was less than a minute’s walk to the clearing, where some dangerous wind had blown an uneven section of grass flat. The stems were still green, but there would be no harvest from this part of the field. On one level, it was terrifying, that a wind could so easily tear down plants that had taken months to grow this tall, had taken countless gallons of precious water.

On the other, once the Dag had spread out her old work blanket and convinced Capable to lay down, it felt like they weren’t at the Citadel at all. There was only the living smell of the grass around them, the stored warmth of the earth under their backs, and the endless stars spooling out above them. Capable couldn’t even see the greenhouses from here. It felt like the grass might go on forever and ever, that she and the Dag were the only two people left in the world. She sighed wordlessly, and felt some unnamed burden lift from her shoulders. This place didn’t care about the number of War Pups clamoring for bikes and cars, didn’t care how many bullets and thunder sticks they had left in the caves. This place didn’t care about the Citadel at all.

“I come here to think,” the Dag said after a long silence. “I have this old tell about stars stuck at the front of my head.”

Capable turned to look at her sister, laying with her arms crossed over her chest and Pheona resting her head on the Dag’s pale shoulder. Even after seventy days working with plants and the unforgiving sun, the Dag’s skin was as milk-white as ever. Burned and peeling in places, but no darker than before.

“The stars were just like people, only full of light. They were so full that everything they touched burned. The whole world. But the light went out of them, a little bit at a time, until they could touch things without burning them. And the light just kept leaking, until almost all the stars were dead and gone. People wanted the light, they hunted for it, they killed for it.”

Capable couldn’t imagine _wanting_ a light that burned so brightly, but she didn’t interrupt. The Dag was clearly piecing the story together, pulling bits and pieces from memories that must have been unused for thousands of days since she’d arrived at the Vault. This was the first Capable had ever heard of starlight.

“The old stars, they weren’t gods like the people thought they were. They just wanted to live like everything lived. They didn’t want to die, they didn’t want to lose their light. So they left. They went back up into the sky, and no one could touch them.”

Capable turned back to look at the stars, and the belt that ran down the middle of the sky. She wondered if there were any star people up there, watching, and what they thought of this terrible burned world. “Sounds alright to me,” she said, when it was clear that the Dag was done with her tell. But her sister turned onto her side, looking on with every ounce of her ghostly intensity.

“It wasn’t right, what they did,” the Dag said, almost urgently. “They weren’t living, just hoarding their light. Everything’s got to die, Capable. The stars that were happiest were the ones who gave away all the light they had, until there was nothing left of them. They lived on in what they did, in the light they gave to others.”

“Are you saying we should give ourselves away? Tear ourselves up into pieces?”

Pheona snorted. “Don’t be silly,” the fox said, coming around her human’s head to look at Capable directly. “She’s saying that what we’re doing is right. Running away to where nothing hurts anymore isn’t living.”

“Out here, everything hurts,” Caelai mimicked Furiosa’s words, and Pheona nodded to the hare.

“ You’re doing everything you can to make this place _good_ ,” the vixen insisted. “That’s more than Joe ever did. You’re already tearing away pieces of yourself, you just can’t see it.”

“We’re not stars, either,” the Dag added, more gently. “We can only give so much of ourselves. But we can take pieces of others.” She reached out to take Capable’s hand again, smiling a little shyly. “You can’t do this without us,” she said. “But we can’t do this without you either.”


End file.
